GERARDO CEDILLO

¿Quieres saber qué pasó aquí? | Recorrido sonoro (Sound Tour) | Centro de la Delegación Iztapalapa, Mexico City | April 8th, 2011

Do you want to know what happened here? Sound tour is an intervention – action that consists on a walk along different streets in the center of Delegación Iztapalapa, with an audio guide that offers an acoustic tour through

Narrations, landscapes and sound collages. The objective is to work on familiar spaces to turn them into imaginary grounds that mutate under the effect of sound while they are walked through. The tour began in the Cuitlahuac Square, there was set the equipment and posters. Pedestrians were invited to a walk along a circuit of nearby streets and avenues, with the objective of finding other landscapes and stories that escape the eye, but are visible through sound. In most occasions, those who were invited refused to participate, some by saying that they didn’t have time, others that they had been living in the surroundings their entire lives and that it was unnecessary to walk around with audio guides while walking through places they did every day, and even less necessary it was to know other stories, because they knew the history of the place. People who accepted could borrow audio equipment and were given a postcard with the map of the tour. The audio equipment contained 11 sound tracks that were played while they visited the points in the circles that were identified by a poster. There were 4 stops where the group who did the tour stopped at to listen to 4 tracks, each about different topics, like the history of the place narrated by my family ( in front of the house where I was born), broken promises of Mexico’s President accompanied by Chopin`s funeral march ( in a government  abandoned facility), a sound collage about education (in front of a private school) and the sound of fireworks mixed with the sound of bullets ( in a bridge). In between each stop there could be listened to sound landscapes, some reproduced with guttural sounds and some were made of different sounds that could lt see through different perceptions of the place. The audio guides were located between fiction and reality. They gave the user a possibility to deconstruct the official tales that the sight imposes, for showing afterwards that a number of situations constantly occurs under these tales. By showing them, not only what happens becomes visible, but also let us resize a situation or problem and act in consequence of it.